Anyone weighed up the pros and cons of electric v water based underfloor heating?

We’re doing our kitchen and want to install some but not sure of the merits of both. The floor is just chipboard on joist as far as we are aware at the moment so thinking of putting a solid floor in as part of the rebuild.

I’ve heard electric is really expensive to run were as Water is cheaper but more expensive to fit.

Has anyone chosen water over Electric?

We have water.
Nice warm feet on a tiled floor.
Bit like storage heater, takes hour or 2 to warm up so need to plan when you want it on, not like a radiator where you come back in the evening and want near instant heat.

Wouldn’t consider electric think there is more to go wrong, more expensive to run.

The idea with underfloor is you leave it on permanently with a stat controlling it.
Why rip out a perfectly good floor to fit a wet underfloor system. That seems an expensive option to me.
And yes electric “mat” heating is on the whole expensive to run!

We have both – water downstairs and an electric mat in bathroom.
The water is excellent but was installed when we built it – don’t forget you will need space for manifold and controls from existing boiler. Also by the time you have laid pipes/polystyrene and screed over, it is a relatively ‘deep’ addition to your floor (An electrical mat with light scree is significantly thinner). Not trying to be a smartarse – and apologies if you have already sussed out the installation differences.
Electrical mat does seem to heat up more quickly but we just switch this on when room is cold. The bathroom floor is ’tiled’ with Karndean.
The downstairs water underfloor heating basically stays on all the time but at a low level.
The electrical mat was very easy to install but as you say, it is expensive to run.
Basically if you have the space and your boiler can cope IME the water based system will be better! The only reason we didn’t install water underfloor heating upstairs was related to cost of fitting.

Yes you can leave it on permanently and yes fine this time of year. What I meant was that end of summer when heating been off for months and you get a chilly evening its not a quick fix.
Those evenings I just throw a few logs in the woodburner

If it was a perfectly good floor I wouldn’t consider ripping it out – we have a few issues… 😉

I’m assuming the flooring connects to the boiler separately to the CH, is this correct?

Thanks for your input, much appreciated.

We have a large warehouse at work for storing raw materials that need to be kept warm. The temperature is kept at around 30c by plastic pipes in the concrete floor, circulating water that is heated in two 3 kw column heaters; these are sumply tall fat tubes containing coiled electric elements exactly like in the kettle, up through which the water passes. 6 kw is enough to keep the entire warehouse toasty; it is amazingly efficient. I dunno if it can be used for domestic heating but I would certainly consider it if I ever built a house.

We’ve got the wet type under floor heating, it runs off the geothermal boiler we’ve got. Great system if you ask me, leave it on 24/7 all year round. Installed a thermostat in each room which allows us to nicely control each area, (open plan house).

Downside is that they are quite slow to warm up, so if we light the fire then the thermostat shuts down the heat to the floor, then in the morning it can feel a little colder, although nothing to worry about.

Heats both our slate and wooden floor fine when the temps drop to minus 20 over here.

I’d love UFH at our place but with a existing solid slab its unlikely to happen – at least a traditional pipe in screed type setup.

Anyone got any experience with the overlay type systems?

Have a look here for info on the different solutions for UFH from polypipe:
Polypipe UFH

Had a good chat with them at the Grand Designs show, and they recommended playing the varying suppliers off against one another and you should be able to get a 40% discount off RRP.

I’m assuming the flooring connects to the boiler separately to the CH, is this correct?

We’ve got underfloor through our whole ground floor – it shares the boiler (as heat source) but has it’s own pump and is controlled by a seperate timer to the traditional upstairs rads.

Seperate timer is critical – as said above you can’t run it like rads, it works best left on at a low level, it doesn’t do instant heat.

Just to reopen this – we’ve been given a quote to put in UF heating but to install it and the work to get to that point doubles our budget.

We’re now considering not having UF heating – but would anyone warn against this and for the sake of a few thousand say it is worth insulating and installing this rather than not insulating the floor and working of a radiator?

We have a solid floor in the utility and we decided against underfloor heating – big mistake; the room is always freezing. We have an electric kickboard heater but it doesn’t do a very good job when the structure is so cold.

I can’t say what is best in your circumstances, but an uninsulated floor is not the nicest thing to live with IMO. UFH isnt imperative – radiators work perfectly well enough, but insulation makes a lot of difference.

I recently helped a mate refurbish his cottage and we were able to add 100mm insulation under one floor, another floor already had some installed at some point, and the third floor we used some polystrene pipe grid (only about 30mm) to give us a some insulation before we put the UFH in rather than lay on uninsulated surface, even though floor levels were tight.

to do three rooms totalling about 500 sq ft, on three circuits cost us about £1k in materials, another £400 in screed, and 4 of us a whole day to screed. I spent a few days working there.

I use these guys for DIY materials.
http://www.underfloorheating1.co.uk/

Overlay insulation board:

I’m assuming you’re looking to retrofit into an existing concrete floor? If so then apparently you can now get slimline pipes that sit on top of the floor. The floor level is raised about 20mm or so, but enables wet UFH to be retrofitted at a sensible cost. From what I can gather they’re pretty good and economical systems, certainly better than electric over a large floor area.

We’ve basically got a ceiling height issue (currently only 200cm high) which is causing some issues – so we’re going to dig down and remove the floor. Gives me the opportunity to take up the floor, insulate and lay the UFH. But the cost…

We did a waterbased system in our bathroom. it runs off the central heating and as people have said it can take a while to warm up but then it stays plently warm for a while after its gone off too. We didn’t build the floor up though, we just routed out a switchback pattern into 22mm thick chipboard flooring, ran 10mm pipe round that was connected to the central heating, put a valve in to release air if need be (hid this under a floating wall/sink unit)and then put insulation under the floorboards to stop too much heat escaping under the floor and tiled as normal. Works fine for us and cost us about 60-70 quid in materials as we added in a few extra joists to support the slightly weakend chipboard flooring.

I’ve got pics somewhere i’ll root them out if need be?

If you are taking the suspended floor out anyway then why not go for it? You can get systems as thin as 16mm that overlay existing floors.

I can only speak from experience of warm water UFH on our ground floor. We installed it as part of a whole house renovation (i.e. crumbling shell) and ripped out the existing rotten wooden ground floor, excavated enough to install a new concrete subfloor, damp proof membrane, insulation board and then the plastic templates and water pipes which were then encased in a 3″ to 4″ concrete floor which effectivley is the radiator. Cost a lot to install relative to the radiators on the upper floors but cost peanuts to run due to the efficiency savings of it being on all the time and just gently fluctuating between an upper and lower set temp (about 4 degrees between the two) so never needs any massive injections of heat from the boiler. Didn’t do it on the upper floors as it’s an old cottage and they are all suspended timber foors and with relatively shallow and exposed ceiling/floor joists and the systems avaialble at the time (circa 2002) with metal heat spreader plates etc were pretty poor to be honest so we stuck with high efficiency radiators instead. They both run off the same boiler but with clever mixing valves etc for the different temparature flows.